Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
The Value of a
Literature Review
Types of Sources
Steps Involved in a
Literature Search
Define the Problem as
Precisely as Possible
Look through One or Two
Secondary Sources
Select the Appropriate
General References
Formulate Search Terms
Search the General
References
Obtain Primary Sources
Doing a Computer
Search
An Example of a Computer
Search
Researching the World Wide
Web
Interlibrary Loans
Writing the Literature
Review Report
Meta-analysis
fter a career in the military, Phil Gomez is in his first year as a teacher at an adult school in Logan, Utah. He
teaches United States history to students who did not graduate from high school but now are trying to
obtain a diploma. He has learned the hard way, through trial and error, that there are a number of techniques
that simply put students to sleep. He sincerely wants to be a good teacher, but he is having trouble getting his
students interested in the subject. As he is the only history teacher in the school, the other teachers are not of
much help.
He wants to get some ideas, therefore, about other approaches, strategies, and techniques that he might use. He
decides to do a search of the literature on teaching to see what he can find out. But he has no idea where to
begin. Should he look at books? journal articles? reports or papers? Are there references particularly geared to the
teaching of American history? What about the possibility of an electronic search? Where should he look?
In this chapter, you will learn some answers to these (and related) questions. When you have finished
reading, you should have a number of ideas about how to do both a manual and an electronic search of the
educational
literature.
The
Value
Literature
Review
of
Types of Sources
A researcher needs to be familiar with three basic types
Abstracts.
2. Primary sources are publications in which researchers report the results of their studies. Authors
communicate their findings directly to readers. Most
primary sources in education are journals, such as
the Journal of Educational Research or the Journal
of Research in Science Teaching. These journals are
usu- ally published monthly or quarterly, and the
articles in them typically report on a particular
research study.
3. Secondary sources refer to publications in which
au- thors describe the work of others. The most
common
67
C HAPTER 5
Steps Involved
in a Literature Search
The following steps are involved in a literature review:
1.
Define the research problem as precisely as
possible.
2. Look at relevant secondary sources.
3. Select and peruse one or two appropriate general
reference works.
4. Formulate search terms (key words or phrases)
pertinent to the problem or question of interest.
5. Search the general references for relevant primary
sources.
6. Obtain and read relevant primary sources, and note
and summarize key points in the sources.
Let us consider each of these steps in some detail.
69
C HAPTER 5
69
70
71
PA R T 2
TABLE 5.1
www.mhhe.com/fraenkel7e
Some of the Major Indexing and Abstracting Services Used in Educational Research
Education Index
ERIC
Psychological
Abstracts
SSCI
Focus
Include abstracts?
Search via computer?
Author index
provided?
First year published
Education
No
Yes
With main entries
Education
Yes
Yes
Monthly
Education
Yes
Yes
Monthly
Social sciences
No
Yes
Three times per year
1929
1927
1973
Include unpublished
documents?
Chief advantage
No
CIJE1969
RIE1966
Yes (in RIE)
No
No
Includes some
material not in CIJE
Very comprehensive
Very comprehensive
Chief disadvantage
No abstracts
Uneven quality of
entries in RIE
same card.
from Digital
Dissertations Source:
ProQuest Information
and Learning. Reprinted with
permission.
Bibliographic Card
Clearly, the abstracts provided in Psychological Abstracts, RIE, and CIJE are more informative than just
the bibliographic data provided in Education Index.
Thus it is perhaps somewhat easier to determine if an
article is pertinent to a particular topic. If a topic
pertains directly to education, little is to be gained by
searching through Psychological Abstracts. If a topic
involves some aspect of psychology, however (such as
educational psychol- ogy), it often is useful to check
Psych Abstracts as well as Education Index, RIE, and
CIJE.
In sum, the abstracts in RIE and Psychological Abstracts are presented in more detail than those in CIJE.
Education Index is less comprehensive than CIJE and
gives only bibliographic information, not abstracts.
CIJE also covers more journals.
The best strategy for a thorough search is probably
as follows.
1. Before 1965: search Education Index.
2. From 1966 to 1968: search RIE and Education
Index.
3. From 1969 to the present: search RIE and CIJE,
usu- ally online.
Professional Journals. Many journals in education Locating Primary Sources. Most primary source
publish reports of research. Some publish articles on a
wide range of educational topics, while others limit
what
b_t
b***
Rt ESEARCH TIPS
75
C HAPTER 5
Suppose a researcher was interested in finding information on the use of questioning in teaching science. A
search of the ERIC database using the descriptors questioning techniques and science would reveal the
abstracts and citations of several articles, two of which
are shown in Figures 5.6a and 5.6b. Notice that the
word source in- dicates where to find the articles if the
researcher wants to read all or part of themone is in
the journal Research in Science and Technological
Education and the other in International Journal of
Science Education.
Searching
PsycINFO.
Searching
through
PsycINFO is similar to searching through RIE and
CIJE. One first pulls up the PsycInfo database. Similar
to a search in ERIC, descriptors can be used singularly
or in various combinations to locate references. All
articles of interest can then be located in the identified
journals.
AN EXAMPLE OF A COMPUTER SEARCH
The steps involved in a computer search are similar to
those involved in a traditional manual search, except
that
76
Figure 5.6a Example of Abstracts Obtained Using the Descriptors Questioning Techniques and Science
Source: From ERIC (Educator Resources Information Center). Reprinted by permission of the U.S. Department of Education, operated by Computer
Sciences Corporation. www.eric.ed.gov
Figure 5.6b Example of Abstracts Obtained Using the Descriptors Questioning Techniques and Science
Source: From ERIC (Educator Resources Information Center). Reprinted by permission of the U.S. Department of Education, operated by Computer
Sciences Corporation. www.eric.ed.gov
Decide on the Extent of the Search. The researcher must now decide how many references to obtain. For a review for a journal article, a researcher
might decide to review only 20 to 25 fairly recent references. For a more detailed review, such as a masters
thesis, perhaps 30 or 40 might be reviewed. For a very
exhaustive review, as for a doctoral dissertation, as
many as 100 or more references might be searched.
Decide on the Database. As we mentioned earlier, many databases are available, but the one most
commonly used is ERIC. Descriptors must fit a particular database; some descriptors may not be applicable to
different databases, although many do overlap. We
used the ERIC database in this example, as it is still the
best for searches involving educational topics.
Narrow search
History
instruction
(Set 2)
Broader search
Questioning
techniques
(Set 1)
History
instruction
(Set 2)
TABLE 5.2
Search
#1
#2
#3
#4
#5
#6
#7
#8
#9
Data base
Results
ERIC
ERIC
ERIC
4031
10143
62
ERIC
7219
ERIC
ERIC
ERIC
5542
9871
ERIC
17856
ERIC
18
Space prevents us from describing the Internet in detail, but we do wish to point out some of its important
features.
Using a Web browser (the computer program that
lets you gain access to the WWW), a researcher can
find information on almost any topic with just a few
clicks of the mouse button. Some of the information on
the Web has been classified into indexes, which can be
easily searched by going from one category to another.
In ad- dition, several search engines are available that
are similar in many respects to those we used in our
search of the ERIC database. Let us consider both
indexes and search engines in a bit more detail.
TABLE 5.3
Directory
Galaxy
http://www.galaxy.com
Go Network
http://www.go.com
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com Librarians Index to the Internet
http://lii.org
Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org
WebCrawler
http://webcrawler.com
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com
TABLE 5.4
AltaVista
Excite
Google
http://www.excite.com
http://www.google.com
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
Lycos
Teoma
http://www.lycos.com
http://www.teoma.com
Search Engines. If one wants more specific information, such as biographical information about George
Orwell, however, one should use a search engine, because it will search all of the contents of a Web site.
Table
5.4 presents brief descriptions of the leading Internet
search engines. Search engines such as Google (Figure
5.9) or the Librarians Index to the Internet (Figure
5.10) use software programs (sometimes called spiders
or web- crawlers) that search the entire Internet,
looking at mil- lions of Web pages and then indexing
all of the words on them. The search results obtained
order of relevancy (i.e., the number of times the researchers search terms appear in a document or how
closely the document appears to match one of the key
words submitted as query terms by the researcher).
A search engine like Google will search for and find
the individual pages of a Web site that match a
researchers search, even if the site itself has nothing to
do with what the researcher is looking for. As a result,
one usually has to wade through an awful lot of irrelevant information. Felden gives us an example:
Returning to the hardware store analogy, if I went to the
store in search of some screws for my household project
and employed an automatic robot instead of using my
native cunning to browse the (well-arranged) aisles, the
robot could conceivably return (after perusing the entire
store) with everything that had a screw in it somewhere.
The set of things would be a wildly disparate collection.
It would include all sorts of boxes of screws, some of
them
maybe even the kind I was looking for, but also a wide
array of other material, much of it of no use for my project.
There might be birdhouses of wood held together with
screws, tools assembled with screws, a rake with a screw
fastening its handle to its prongs. The robot would have
done its job properly. It had been given something to
match, in this case
a screw, and it went out and did its work efficiently
and thoroughly, although without much intelligence.2
and animation.
INTERLIBRARY LOANS
A problem that every researcher faces at one time or
an- other is that a needed book or journal is not available
in the library. With the coming of computers, however,
it is now very easy to borrow books from distant
libraries. Many li- brarians can enter information into a
computer terminal and find out within seconds which
libraries within a des- ignated area have a particular
Writing
Literature
Review Report
the
META-ANALYSIS
Literature reviews accompanying research reports in
journals are usually required to be brief. Unfortunately,
this largely prevents much in the way of critical
analysis of individual studies. Furthermore, traditional
literature reviews basically depend on the judgment of
the re- viewer and hence are prone to subjectivity.
Main Points
(3) selecting and perusing an appropriate general reference; (4) formulating search
terms; (5) searching the general references for relevant primary sources; (6) obtaining
and reading the primary sources, and noting and summarizing key points in the
sources.
Key terms
abstract 67
Boolean operators 78
descriptors 72
general reference 67
For
Discussion
index 80
literature review 67
primary source 67
search engine 80
search terms 72
secondary source 67
Web browser 80
World Wide Web 80
1. Why might it be unwise for a researcher not to do a review of the literature before
planning a study?
2. Many published research articles include only a few references to related studies.
How would you explain this? Is this justified?
3. Which do you think are more important to emphasize in a literature reviewthe
opinions of experts in the field or related studies? Why?
4. One rarely finds books referred to in literature reviews. Why do you suppose this is
so? Is it a good idea to refer to books?
5. Can you think of any type of information that should not be included in a literature
review? If so, give an example.
6. Professor Jones states that he does not have his students do a literature review
before planning their masters theses because they take too much time, and he
wants them to get started collecting their data as quickly as possible. In light of the
infor- mation we have provided in this chapter, what would you say to him? Why?
7. Can you think of any sorts of studies that would not benefit from having the researcher conduct a literature review? If so, what might they be?
1. N. Felden (2000). Internet research: Theory and practice. (2nd ed.). London: McFarland & Co.,
pp. 124125.
2. Ibid., p. 127.
3. A. Glossbrenner and E. Glossbrenner (1998). Search engines. San Francisco: San Francisco State University Press, pp. 1113.
4. Ibid., p. 12.
5. Ibid.
6. M. L. Smith, G. V. Glass, and T. I. Miller (1980). Primary, secondary, and meta-analysis research.
Educa- tional Researcher, 5 (10): 38.
7. Ibid.
Notes
Problem Sheet 5
An electronic version of
this Problem Sheet that
you can fill in and
print, save, or e-mail is
available on the Online
Learning Center at
www.mhhe.com/
fraenkel7e.
Descriptor(s)
Results
A full-sized version of
this Problem Sheet
that you can fill in or
photocopy is in your
Student Mastery
Activities book.